One proposed bill in Harrisburg aiming to reform charter schools has officials in the Wissahickon School District up in arms.

The Wissahickon School Board approved a resolution opposing Senate Bill 1085 regarding charter school reform during its Feb. 10 meeting.

“Just to remind everyone what this bill would do,” board member Ron Stoloff said, “it would take a situation that is already not really good, and make it worse.”

Stoloff laid out his major complaints with the bill, which range from a decrease of control of a charter by a local school district, to how charters are financed. Under the current regulations, a charter school must go before local school boards every five years to ask for renewal. The process allows districts to research the progress of the school and, if needed, revoke its rights to exist should it not live up to the standard of education it needs to meet. Under the proposed bill, that review process would occur every 10 years.

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“Ten years is an eternity in education,” Stoloff said. “Just think of where your student is now and where they will be in 10 years, and that’s what a tremendous amount of damage can be done in that period of time. Five years is not terrific, but 10 years is a horror story waiting to happen.”

Stoloff also said he disagreed with the idea that a college or university can decide “willy nilly” to start a charter school, while not allowing local school districts to have a say in “what the charter would be, what its theme would be and how it gets students.”

Meanwhile, the local school district “would still have to pay for all the students there,” he said.

Cyber charters are another area of contention and Stoloff said it’s unfair that those schools should be paid the same amount of money as a brick-and-mortar charter school “even though their costs are really a fraction of that.”

Lastly, Stoloff said the bill would take away the board’s ability to control the size of a charter.

“It can start off with 100 students,” he said, “and then completely at the charter’s control, it could then say we’re going to have 30,000 students. Not quite, but right now if a school wants to enlarge, it has to ask us, if it’s in our area. But this would take that power away from us.”

Stoloff reiterated that it was just another example of ways in which districts were losing control.

“It is just a bad bill,” he said. “It can be fixed, but as it stands now, it is not [to] our benefit or our students’ benefit.”

Stoloff also addressed a criticism that the district currently only has somewhere between 20 to 25 students enrolled in charter schools and paying for the schools was a minor inconvenience.

“Well, that’s today,” he said. “There’s no telling what will happen in a few years if this bill becomes law. That’s why I want us to go along with several other districts in the Montgomery County area, to make known our displeasure about the bill.”

President Charles McIntyre said he’s “wrestled back and forth” with the idea of whether to support or reject the bill, but ultimately he said the costs outweighed the benefits.

“I’ve been a proponent for a long time to address the things which Mr. Stoloff had mentioned,” McIntyre said, “that is, there’s a couple of issues here … One is the way charter schools and cyber charter schools are formed. The school districts and the state [both] pay into the pension plans. It’s called a double dip. So that needs to be addressed. The other, regarding funding for cyber charter schools, there just needs to be a different way to fund cybers and the brick and mortars. So this has cost the school districts a considerable amount of money, a lot of money as a matter of fact.”

McIntyre said that the bill was attempting to address some of the problems with charters, and while it wasn’t ideal, it was the first piece of legislation in Harrisburg to address the issue at all.

“But then it went too far,” he said, reiterating the fact that universities and colleges could create charter schools. “That means if we create charters schools without public officials, you [shut out] the school board, which are elected by you, the public. And that’s just plain wrong.”